


Keep Me Warm Until I Wake

by haraya



Category: Samurai Love Ballad: PARTY, 天下統一恋の乱 Love Ballad | Samurai Love Ballad (Video Game)
Genre: Brotherly Affection, F/M, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-12-10 05:35:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11685150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haraya/pseuds/haraya
Summary: Five times Nobuyuki gets sort of rudely woken up, and one time he doesn’t.





	Keep Me Warm Until I Wake

**Author's Note:**

> Still don't know what Nobuyuki's childhood name is, exactly, but I'm keeping 'Genzaburou' because having a nameless MC complicates things enough without having _another_ unnamed character messing up the pronouns.

**I.**

(Things were uncomplicated, once.)

He wakes up to the sound of his baby brother crying, followed by the sound of his mother’s lilting voice whispering hushed nonsense to calm him.

It’s warm.

When he opens his eyes it’s to the late afternoon sunlight filtering in through the shoji doors, and to his mother’s smile, just as bright, visible above the curve of her shoulder as she looks over at him.

“Done with your nap, dear?”

“I wasn’t asleep,” he mumbles, protesting, and feels around with his hand until he finds the discarded scroll with the map of Shinano he’s supposed to be studying.

His mother laughs, before carding her fingers gently through his hair.

“Go back to sleep, dear one.”

“But Father—”

“He won’t mind.”

He can hear the smile in her voice; can imagine the way her blue eyes shimmer with a kind of mischievous threat.

“Yes he would,” he grumbles, although he’s having a hard time keeping his eyes open, and his mother’s hand in his hair isn’t really helping.

She laughs again, the happy sound filling the room like a song.

“Sleep, dear,” she says. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Mm.” He surrenders.

(Everyone surrenders to Lady Sanada, in the end.)

He nuzzles sleepily into his mother’s side. “Love you.”

A soft kiss is pressed into his hair. “Love you, too.”

The bedding is soft, and the quiet chirping of cicadas outside is soothing, and his baby brother is gurgling contentedly in his mother’s arms.

“Love you too, Benmaru,” he adds, just before sleep finds him again.

It’s all so, so warm.

 

\---

 

**II.**

“Brotheeeeerrr!”

Benmaru slams open the door to his room hard enough that it jumps on its track. “Brother brother brother brother brother  _brotheeeeeeeerrrr!!!”_

He feels himself bounced around on his bedding as his brother jumps up and down with unfettered five-year-old energy.

“Brotheeeeerrr,” Benmaru wheedles, shaking him by the shoulder. “Wake uuuuuuuup!”

Snickering to himself, he rolls over, trapping Benmaru between his arms and legs and pinning him to the mattress.

“I’m awake,” he promises, despite very decidedly  _not_  getting up.

_“Brotheeerrr!”_ Benmaru whines, struggling against his hold. “Get up get up get  _up!_  It’s Children’s Day and you said you’d come to the temple with me and Mother!”

“Mhmm.”

_“Brotheeeeeeeerrrr!!!”_

“He’s not going to stop until you get up, you know,” a soft voice says calmly from the open doorway.

He opens his eyes to see his mother standing there, backlit by the sunlight with an almost ethereal glow.

“Mother!” Benmaru shouts from the tangle of their limbs, and squirms even harder.

But he stays still, looking at his mother with an unsettled feeling in his chest.

Perhaps it’s the light, but she looks paler than usual.  _Frailer._

Perhaps it’s his imagination, but she looks like she could disappear at any moment.

“Genzaburou?” his mother says, smiling.

(She’s always smiling. He got that from her.)

He shakes his head, finally letting his brother up, and fixes a smile on his face to mirror hers.

“I’ll be right there.”

“Yay!” Benmaru cheers, running to their mother and tugging on her hand, already chattering away as they leave him to get dressed.

He tells himself she’s fine. It was a trick of the light, that’s all.

(Nobuyuki is a very good liar, but he’d started by lying to himself.)

 

\---

 

**III.**

He never sleeps easy when it rains.

Thunder cracks across the sky, but it isn’t the storm that woke him, he realizes. It's—

“Brother?”

He opens his eyes to see Benmaru peeking into his room, a dark silhouette in the doorway as the rain batters the windows.

“Come in and close the door, Benmaru. You’re letting the rain in.”

Sheepishly his brother shuffles into the room, making his way across the dark floor until he’s kneeling by the bedding.

Sighing wordlessly, Genzaburou lifts the covers, and his brother climbs in with no hesitation at all, curling into his side under the blankets.

Benmaru always runs a little warmer than he does, his little body quickly heating up the space under the covers.

( _He’d gotten that from their mother,_  he remembers, his thoughts already growing fuzzy.  _Their mother was always so, so warm._ )

Without realizing it, he’s running his fingers through his little brother’s hair, murmuring hushed nonsense as the storm rages on.

He still can’t sleep easy, but at least it’s warm.

 

\---

 

**IV.**

He drifts in and out of consciousness, though for how long he doesn’t know.

_“Brother!”_

The shoji door slams open with unrestrained force, startling Nobuyuki and rudely pulling him all the way back to consciousness. He groans.

“Not so loud, Yukimura, if you don’t mind?”

His voice is hoarse with disuse, and sounds pathetic even to his ears.

“Sorry,” his brother mumbles, sheepishly. “But you’re awake! That’s good.”

_“Mmrghhh.”_

His head is pounding, and the rest of him is  _burning,_  which isn’t really something he’d describe as  _good,_  but as bits and pieces of his memory returns he decides it’s a victory, overall.

“What are you doing here, Yukimura?”

“I can’t just stay in Kai when you’re fighting poison!” his brother huffs, indignant. “Anyway, Lord Shingen himself sent me and Saizo home as soon as we got word.”

Right, he was poisoned. That explains a lot.

“Did they—?”

“Yeah,” Yukimura says, kneeling beside his bedding with a serious expression. “I put Saizo on the trail.”

“Ah.”

So that’s that, then.

“But anyway,” Yukimura continues, his usual cheerful tone returning, “Father was really frantic, you know? He sent for a new poison taster and everything, just for you!”

“Did he now?”

_He would,_  Nobuyuki realizes. His father would do anything not to lose the heir to the clan.

(Not when they’ve lost so much already.)

Just then a shadow appears through the door, followed by a high, reedy voice calling through the screen.

“Milords?” the stranger says, tentative. “I’ve brought breakfast.”

“Oh, nice timing,” Yukimura says, turning toward the door. “Come in.”

The door slides open—gently, this time—almost timidly, as if whoever is behind it  _really_ doesn’t want to be there.

“Brother,” Yukimura says brightly, turning back to him, though Nobuyuki’s gaze remains fixed on the newcomer. “This is your new personal poison taster, Yahiko.”

 

\---

 

**V.**

“You can’t be creeping up on my brother while he’s asleep!”

_Oh dear,_  Nobuyuki thinks, laughing softly to himself as he wakes.  _He’s really got no indoor voice, has he?_

He dresses up quickly and quietly, and slips out behind his brother as the rest of them argue.

“I wouldn’t mind?” Nobuyuki interrupts smoothly.

“Exactly, he wouldn’t mi . . . nd!?”

Seeing his brother’s shocked face never fails to amuse him, surely, although this year he’s treated to the even more fascinating sight of your cheeks turning a soft pink as you try to hide behind Saizo and Sasuke.

(It’s a good way to be woken up, all in all.)

He gets a kick out of flustering his brother, and the disappointed look on Sasuke’s face when he realizes his plans have been foiled, but most of all,  _most of all,_  he takes immense pleasure in the way your face turns a furious shade of red when he says he wouldn’t mind a surprise wake-up call from you.

(And he means it, too.)

 

\---

 

**I.**

He wakes, this time, to quiet birdsong, and gentle sunlight, and the warmth of you curled around him.

He smiles.

He brushes your hair aside, revealing the soft expanse of your skin, until he finds the mark he’d left on you, at the junction where your neck meets your shoulder.

Delight and desire well up in him when he sees it. He has the sudden urge to kiss it, and then with a fierce sort of joy he realizes he  _can,_  so he does.

“Mm . . . nghhh!?”

He huffs a breath of a laugh against your skin when you stir, feeling so impossibly, incredibly  _happy._

“Good morning,” Nobuyuki mumbles, lips brushing a line up your throat, to your jaw, until he’s nibbling at your ear.

Your breath hitches, and his smile turns feral as he pins you down onto the bedding.

(This is a good way to wake up, too.)

 


End file.
